I let an elderly homeless man sleep on my covered porch during a brutal summer storm. By sunrise, he was gone. But when I lifted the blanket he had carefully folded beside my front door, I found something hidden beneath the doormat with my name written across it.

And I have had eleven weeks to work out why I did not ask, and the answer is not complicated and it is not flattering, and it took me about four of those weeks to be willing to write it down.

Because asking his name would have made him a person I knew.

Not a man in a storm. Not a situation that ended when the rain did. A person, with a name, in my neighbourhood.

And a person I knew on a Thursday is a person I might have to think about on a Friday, and a Saturday, and in about four weeks' time when it was cold again.

I had eleven dollars of slack a month and an eight-year-old and a job and two in the morning.

I did not have room for a person. I had room for one night, and I gave him an extremely good one night, and I made absolutely sure that was where it stopped.

So I gave him the blanket instead.

And the cushions, and the towel, and the hot plate with four extra potatoes on it.

Which is what you give somebody when you have decided — without ever once putting it into words, without ever admitting it to yourself at a window — that you would much rather be kind to them than know them.

And it goes further than one question at a door.

I had four days.

That is the part that keeps me up now, and it has replaced the arithmetic entirely.

He was not gone. Not on the Friday, and not on the Saturday either — because he did not get on that bus, obviously, because he had given me the fare.

He was somewhere within about four miles of my own front door for the best part of a week.

He was buying one coffee a day from a shop at the end of my road.

And I had two hundred and twelve dollars of his money in a drawer in my kitchen, under the takeaway menus.

And what I did was put it in the drawer.

I told myself I would ask around at the weekend.

I told myself that on the Friday. And again on the Saturday, in a car park. And by the Monday I had told myself four separate times, in four separate places, each time with complete sincerity.

And on the Tuesday Junie went back to school, and there was a thing with her shoes, and the week went the way weeks go when you have eleven dollars of slack in it.